A war hero, ex-Congressman, professor of "popular but somewhat notorious reputation," television personality, and husband of the rich and beautiful Deborah ("a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz"), Stephen Rojack is living the American dream. But his enviable life conceals a strange tension, the constant "itch to jump," and when one day he finally cracks and strangles his luscious wife, Rojack unleashes a personality of undreamt-of ferocity. When it was published in 1965, An American Dream shocked readers with its graphic depictions of sex and violence—Life called it "a devil's encyclopedia of our secret visions and desires"—yet the novel's white-hot prose makes it, for many, Norman Mailer's finest achievement.

"Mailer writes like an angel—a master of small surprises that are precursors of seismic shocks."—London Review of Books